Windows client UIs commonly apply an AutoComplete feature that fill lists with partial-matching combo box selections while you type. But this feature appears less commonly in Web forms. Steve’s Dynamic Data and Field Templates - An Advanced FieldTemplate of August 2, 2008 describes how to combine the AutoCompleteFilter.asmx, AutoCompleteStyle.css, and AutoComplete.ascx files from the ADO.NET Dynamic Data Futures Project download on CodePlex to create an AutoCompleteText_Edit FieldTemplate.

If your WebForms’ combo box lists grow to exceed your page height, you probably need to group selections by category, which requires what the ADO.NET Dynamic Data team calls a CascadingFilter. The CascadingFilter FieldTemplate also is part of the ADO.NET Dynamic Data Futures Project download from CodePlex.

Eric White Uses LINQ to XML to Minimize Lines and Speed-Read Code

Eric’s LINQ Reduces Line Counts and Makes Code “Pop” post of August 2, 2008 demonstrates how to move from traditional imperative-style coding to a functional approach with LINQ to XML. A simple example shortens a 22-line foreach method to 12 lines of much easier-to-read method that uses chained LINQ to XML method-call syntax.

Added: 8/3/2008

Michael Neel Uses LINQ to XML to Generate HTML

Dell Inc. isn’t short on chutzpa. The Round Rock computer maker has redefined the term “Cloud Computing” and is attempting to obtain a trademark on it for a wide range of computer-related services, none of which conform to the accepted definitions for cloud computing of which I’m aware. Wikipedia’s entry is closest to the mark for me.

LINQ to SQL has supported drag-and-drop generation of master/details and master/details/subdetails forms from the Data Sources window since its first appearance in an early Orcas beta release.

The version of Entity Framework (EF) v1 in the Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Beta release can drag-and-drop TextBox or DataGridView icons from the Data Sources window to the form in design mode, but the Data Source nodes don’t include EntityReferences, such as Order.Employee and Order.Shipper, or EntityCollections, such as Customer.Orders or Order.Order_Details. Neither does the current EF v1 release display foreign key values unless they’re part of a primary key, such as Order_Detail.OrderID and Order_Detail.ProductID.

Andrew Matthews Seeks Community Help with Enhancing LINQ to RDF

LinqToRdf* is a full-featured LINQ query provider for .NET written in C#. It provides developers with an intuitive way to make queries on semantic web databases. The project has been going for over a year and it’s starting to be noticed by semantic web early adopters and semantic web product vendors. LINQ provides a standardised query language and a platform enabling any developer to understand systems using semantic web technologies via LinqToRdf. It will help those who don’t have the time to ascend the semantic web learning curve to become productive quickly.

He’s seeking help for development, testing, and promotion, as well as several new features:

SOAP requests to SSDS entities require a Scope with an instance of the new (in Sprint 3) VersionMatch class to manage concurrency conflicts. Eugenio’s Concurrency in SSDS post of August 1, 2008 shows you how to implement and test it.

Chad Myers Proposes Expression-Tree Query Objects for Use by Repositories

Chad concludes that the single repository model has …

the potential for business logic (also known as ‘where’ clauses) to creep into the repository which would be bad. Perhaps a better alternative would be to encapsulate the specific logic of a given query into an object. You could then have this object produce something that the repository could (blindly, decoupled) use to query on.

This approach allows you to maintain the one repository approach, yet still have encapsulated domain-specific queries. Plus, you can test your queries independently of the repository which is a huge benefit.

Mehfuz Releases LINQ to Flickr 1.4 with New Features

I have updated it with the latest LINQExtender (pre release version) containing updated Object Tracking Service (OTS) that will enable it to update photos and comments as if like LINQ to SQL.

It also adds Extras support, which enables querying with Extras enum for additional information about your photos.

Article about ADO.NET Data Services by the Flaskos in August 2008 MSDN Magazine

Elisa and Mike Flasko’s “Expose And Consume Data in A Web Services World” article appears in the August 2008 issue of MSDN Magazine. In addition to demonstrating the usual Entity Framework back-end, the article shows you how to create an Astoria service for an in-memory CLR objects.

[M]any companies and many individual developers too for that matter, will not contemplate looking at a new architectural paradigm until such time as it appears on the Microsoft development stack. …

With the release of Visual Studio 2008 SP1 this summer, that is all about to change, an ORM tool (albeit a flawed one) will then become a first class citizen in the Microsoft development stack. That fact will open up the world of ORM to many more people, and as those people explore that new world many will drift to XPO and other ORM tools, making 2009, in my opinion, a great year to be in the ORM space.

This app uses a single Container (guestbook) with two Entity 'Kinds' (guest and message). Users can create an account and then post messages for everyone to see. You can also filter the message list by guest's nickname.

I'm testing out the user account authentication pattern (a custom HTTP Basic using cookies for browsers) and the notion of running queries in a single container over multiple 'Kinds.' I am also working on a solid list/query caching (and cache _invalidation_) pattern as SSDS does not yet support ETags/caching of lists.

Mary Jo quotes Greg Linden, a former Amazon developer who founded Findory.com and now works in Microsoft’s Live Labs group:

Scope is similar to Yahoo's Pig, which is a higher level language on top of Hadoop, or Google's Sawzall, which is a higher level language on top of MapReduce. But, where Pig focuses on and advocates a more imperative programming style, Scope looks much more like SQL.

“Microsoft has developed a distributed computing platform, called Cosmos, for storing and analyzing massive data sets. Cosmos is designed to run on large clusters consisting of thousands of commodity servers. Disk storage is distributed with each server having one or more direct-attached disks.”

I don’t believe that SCOPE or Cosmos have a direct relationship to SQL Server Data Services (SSDS) today. However, one of the reasons that SSDS initial design is schemaless, implements flexible entities, and has little resemblance to traditional relational database management systems (RDBMSs) might be compatibility with a future SSDS upgrade or different version that runs under SCOPE and uses the Cosmos file system.

Rob and Ayende Rahien come up with a new approach to Lazy Loading With The LazyList implementation of IList<T> that takes an IQueryable definition in its constructor. This July 30, 2008 post shows you how to include LINQ Let statements …

This is part of fooling Linq To Sql so it doesn't try to introspect this relationship and build some weird SQL statement. I had to create these methods and they are simply filter statements that return IQueryable<Product> (you can see these in the checked in Storefront code).

Ben stated "if you are creating new applications or just adding on features to your current app I would use LINQ or EF instead of ADO Datasets” and an earlier post and goes on to detail the reasons in his Are ADO.NET Datasets dead? post of July 30, 2008.

I don’t believe that DataSets are dead, but they’ll certainly be on life support in a year or two.

The dual Web role application has been running in Microsoft's South Central US (San Antonio) data center since September 2009. I believe it is the oldest continuously running Windows Azure application.

About Me

I'm a Windows Azure Insider, a retired Windows Azure MVP, the principal developer for OakLeaf Systems and the author of 30+ books on Microsoft software. The books have more than 1.25 million English copies in print and have been translated into 20+ languages.

Full disclosure: I make part of my livelihood by writing about Microsoft products in books and for magazines. I regularly receive free evaluation software from Microsoft and press credentials for Microsoft Tech•Ed and PDC. I'm also a member of the Microsoft Partner Network.